The recent American disaster relief and particularily the response to disaster in the Gulf Coast underline the essential problem in America today and that is a Crises of Competence. Somehow lost in the great ideological debate whether there should be a strong national government or a strong local government was the concept that it must be a competent government most of all. It matters little to a fire victem in California, a drowning victim in New Orleans, or a displaced homeless family in Mississippi whether it is a private sector government led relief effort or a federal government led relief effort, but whether it is competent at doing the job in the first place.
During the Bush Administration much effort has been spent on ideological considerations that government should still spend lots of money, but it should go to the private sector not a federal government led project. This has led to needlessly wastefull spending with enormous blunders where ideology has been the controlling factor rather than competence. The scandalous revelations of FEMA's Michael Brown's resume come most to mind as an example of ideology and whom you know, rather than what you know. Apparently it was more important to find an ideological match than a competent one for FEMA Director.
Wake up! It never has been the amount of money spent on a project that determined its success, but whether the money was spent wisely to start with. Efficient and competent government is what should be the norm and not the concern of whether it should be either Big Government or Private Sector Government. If the government does not do its job, it is a bad government period.
Thomas P. Love
1 comment:
Since Reagan the neocon message has mutated from small government ideal, into a virulent anti-government ideology. The result is deliberate incompetance. The process goes as follows.
1) If it is working, break it.
2) Once it is broken, claim it was always broken, and therefore we must
3) . . . get rid of it.
To to govern even a limited government requires competance. For people who have decided that government must be destroyed, however, incompetance becomes not only acceptable but necessary. Incompetance completes the self-fulling prophecy/message that government is bad.
The easiest form of incompetance is corruption because it lines the pockets of those seeking to destroy government. Indeed neocon Republicans aren't even ashamed of their corruption because they believe in the private (corrupting) interest over the public interest in the first place. They aren't just corrupt, but corrupt on purpose and with ideological zeal.
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